The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  The next day Pat and Ellen had cocktails with Peggy Guggenheim. Pat thought that Sinbad, Peggy’s son by the painter Lawrence Vail, was “looking sickish,” and that “Peggy [was] jaded” and that she “barely took in the fact of my movie.” The movie again—and Pat was irritated because Guggenheim had ignored it. Without any publication for months now, Pat was beginning to think of the Hitchcock movie of Strangers on a Train as her calling card.

  Ellen, after entertaining Pat with “wonderfully” silly stories, “tells me I have a new mood every 20 minutes.” It was the kind of remark Mother Mary used to make to Pat—and it was the kind of remark Pat used to frighten herself. While she was still with Ginnie Catherwood, Pat had written in a notebook: “I am troubled by a sense of being several people (nobody you know). Should not be at all surprised if I become a dangerous schizophrene in my middle years.” And then she’d added: “I write this very seriously.”23

  By 20 September, Pat was still feeling like the “Prince Consort” and Ellen was still on a “spree,” signing them into the most palatial establishment (the “swankiest hotel” is what Pat called it) on Lake Como. “I care nothing about money these days, not that I have any,” Pat wrote in a moment of pauvresse oblige. Ellen was paying for everything. “But it is this…unknown side of me that Ellen finds so attractive: impracticality, generosity, imagination, the poet, the dreamer, the child. And I am too inclined to act a part, in all of it.” And, because Pat was making her diary entries retrospectively, she added: “This fact is to make the next few weeks difficult.”

  The difficulty was easy to identify: Ellen had already tired of playing the role of Maecenas, and Pat was bored with playing the role of fey, artistic dependent. Both women were miscast in the melodrama they continued to improvise for each other. It was going to make their next few years difficult, not just their next few weeks.

  On 22 September, they were in Ascona, Switzerland, with Ellen’s stomach upset and Pat in a jealous fit over Ellen’s past lovers. (Usually it was the reverse: Ellen was jealous and Pat was in gastric distress.) They both got over their maladies, with Pat deciding that Ellen’s past lovers were “faute de mieux, as was Jeanne and Ann S[mith] for me…. Ellen & I are both extravagantly happy just now.” And so they stayed on in Ascona—as Pat wrote in a reference to Henry James’s The Ambassadors—“like Chad and his European mistress. So seldom do I really live.” “Live all you can” is the advice Lambert Strether offers to Little Bilham in that marvellous novel, which was soon to provide both a structure and a story for The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  On their way to Zurich, Pat was impressed by the St. Gotthard Pass: “most exciting and thrilling to me. As much as the Endless Caverns when I was a child.” With Ellen driving and directing, Pat, with her clear understanding of the balance of power, felt as she had on a cross-country car trip to Texas with her parents two decades before when she was nine: “[S]he has the car, therefore all the authority somehow, and I am a child whose nose has to be wiped.”24 The detour Pat’s family had made to the Endless Caverns in Virginia on that trip in 1930 was what Pat would later call her “first push in the direction of writing”: the otherworldly beauty of the caverns and their Alice in Wonderland history (the Endless Caverns were found by two boys going down a rabbit hole) moved Pat to give her first “entertaining” speech in front of her fourth-grade class.25 Travelling with Ellen Hill would continue to provide Pat with many more of these “pushes” towards creativity—and most of them would be as unwillingly bestowed as they were ungratefully received.

  Zurich, Pat found, was “very prim and bourgeois and opulent. I am a bit sated on luxury.” A honeymoon with no writing attached to it was making her restless. “I am not really content unless I am pulled at like something on a rubber band—elasticity, limitations, a time schedule, etc. Only with more social graces can I obviate this American bad habit of having to be doing something.”26

  Back in Munich in early October she at last saw “the movie,” Hitchcock’s version of Strangers on a Train. “I am pleased in general. Especially with Bruno, who held the movie together as he did the book.” By 1988, Pat had changed her mind—by then, she had changed her mind about nearly everything—complaining to a journalist that the changing of Guy’s profession had ruined the film; that Guy didn’t carry out the murder; and that he was in love with that “stone angel,” actress Ruth Roman.27 (Hitchcock wanted Grace Kelly for the role but couldn’t get her released from another contract.) When Pat saw “her movie” for the first time, she didn’t seem to know that Robert Walker, the actor who played Bruno with such demonic flair, had died tragically a few weeks after the film opened in the United States, driven by his own particular demons.

  Pat and Ellen were late to the Munich showing of Strangers on a Train, and Pat’s friend from Brooklyn, Jack Matcha, who years later would publish her favorite snail story, “The Snail-Watcher,” in Gamma, his short-lived American magazine, was there with his friend Tessa. Ellen refused to dine with them on the grounds that they were beneath her socially. “Ellen,” Pat wrote, “can be damned unpleasant, especially her voice—and I am ashamed before Jack, who might be a proletarian, but who is still a real guy.”

  Ellen was now intensely critical, and Pat was drinking heavily and denying it. “‘The minute something goes wrong, you take to the bottle,’ Ellen accuses me unjustly—but if anyone ever did drive me to drink, it’s she!” Then Pat read a “splendid translation of ‘The Snail-Watcher’ by [Jean] Rosenthal,” and Ellen remarked that the translation was “better than the original.” Pat missed the sting in this remark—or perhaps she didn’t, because she said she was feeling “sleepy, overweight, indecisive, and unentertaining” and went on to give her friend Jo the “calculated” impression that “Ellen and I shall not be together very much longer.” Her affair with Ellen was not yet one month old.

  Still, Pat and Ellen had their intensely loving moments—and they both continued to play their roles, with Pat revelling in being the trusting, dependent child. “[Ellen] says she wonders how I survive, in the world, all alone. She means, I suppose, I can’t remember figures, and I seem to trust everyone…. I’ve never been so in love with anyone, not even, I think, Ginnie. (At last!)”28 And Ellen, the authoritarian parent, went right on (between scarring arguments) telling Pat what Pat loved to hear: “‘You’re the best lover I’ve ever seen—heard of—read about…. I absolutely adore you. You’re exactly what I want.’”29 But Ellen also remarked that Pat was “the only person she’d ever met who could be in love & critical at once.”30

  By the end of October Pat had a menstrual period so copious that it was “coming on like a faucet” and “terrifying” her. She was making notes for The Sleepless Night [later The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder] and working on “a great sheet of yellow paper, with the characters and general outlines of chapters. But there will be no chapters. There will be no quotation marks, no prose description or background work. Each person will be the style of it, and that will probably take experiment.”31

  This tantalizing description—was she remembering her enthusiastic response to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves?—has nothing to do with the ten very ordinary pages of The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder left in Pat’s archives. Pat began writing the book on 30 October and was immediately depressed: “Every book is perfect until one begins to write it.” In early November she got a letter from Margot saying that Alfred Hitchcock was interested in “new material” and would pay Pat’s way to London if she had any “new ideas” to tell him. Pat began to “dope out” a “passport idea.”32 It came to nothing.

  By New Year’s Eve, Pat and Ellen were fighting over every inch of territory in Ellen’s Munich apartment and over Pat’s “sloppy” habits, as well. Rebellious feelings against an older woman had always made Pat messy, and the more humiliated she felt, the more enthusiastically she described her sexual life with Ellen—or lack thereof. Still, she wrote that “Ellen does me favors, gives me more than I can give her.”33 Again, this
imbalance was to prove productive for Pat, and on 11 January she sat down to write a “synopsis of crime by imitation, an idea which currently fascinates me.” Two of that developing idea’s discarded titles would be “A Man Provoked” and “A Deadly Innocence,” but the brilliant novel that eventually issued from her discomfort was published as The Blunderer.34 On 27 January, Pat was finishing a version of The Sleepless Night in Ellen’s apartment. She was working resentfully in the living room—“I feel I must clear out before she returns from the office”—and was reduced to sullennness, obduracy, and the bottle. She found Ellen’s presence “cramping, censorious.” She began to stay in Salzburg whenever she could.

  When Pat and Ellen drove to Paris, Nice, Cannes, Montpellier, and Barcelona in February and March of 1952 (they always travelled as though pursued by Furies, taking rooms and houses for short periods and leaving them quickly, moving almost as aimlessly as the “beatniks” Pat would later react to with such disgust), their trip was one long quarrel intermitted by the occasional night of passion and long, freezing periods of sexual abstention. In Paris, Pat was “reprimanded” by Janet Flanner for asking favors of others (yet another of Pat’s mishaps with objects: this one involved a trunk belonging to Pat which Pat had casually left Flanner to deal with), and Pat admitted that she wasn’t doing her “share” in her relationship with Ellen. They saw Mme Lyne: Ellen hated her, pointing to her “Jewishness.” They visited Esther Murphy Arthur and her lover in their “palatial apartment” on the rue de Lille. They had a bitter fight in the telephone booth of the Café de Flore and Pat pushed Ellen unceremoniously out of the booth. They saw Robert Calmann-Lévy, director of the Calmann-Lévy publishing house, fighting right up to the door of the restaurant where they were to meet him.

  By 7 March Pat was writing “Hell on Wheels,” a satirical account of their drive from Paris to Cannes, and was reading, “enthusiastically” and with obvious identification, Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim. One night, apparently drunk, Pat tried to crawl into bed with Ellen very late and Ellen said: “This or us must stop.” Later on—another middle of another bad night—Ellen tried to approach Pat sexually and Pat struck her. Their pattern was set in stone: the relationship would be over a thousand times before it was “over.”

  By June of 1952, Pat was in Rome, seeing Jim Merrill and his boyfriend Bobby Isaacson and inquiring after, but not meeting, Marguerite Young, one of her recommenders for Yaddo, who was also in Rome expanding the “Miss Mackintosh thing [Young’s celebrated novel, Miss Macintosh, My Darling] to a 900 page book.” Pat read Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and McCullers’s short stories and found them all “[b]eautiful—a discovery.” By 4 July, she was thinking again about The Blunderer, a “4th novel…which will be about the man who murders by imitation. A model of verity…and tragedy in the hopelessness of his unhappy marriage which I shall create from the worst aspects of mine.”

  In a deadly depression, she went with Ellen to Ischia, Positano, and Naples. At the end of July, Pat travelled alone to Forio to see W. H. Auden for a meeting which disappointed her. She found Auden barefoot and accompanied by a boy. “I wanted to talk of poetry,” she wrote, still alive with resentment fifteen years later, “and all he spoke of were the cheaper prices of things here.”35 People would say the same thing about Pat’s own conversational gambits in the future. She mailed Auden a copy of Strangers on a Train, and he eventually wrote back from his apartment on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village a letter praising her depiction of Bruno but questioning her portrayal of Guy.36

  Although Pat and Ellen would quarrel from Anacapri to Ischia, from Florence to Trieste to Rome (there was, in fact, no European city through which they passed in which they didn’t stage a pitched battle), it was on this trip that Pat, leaving Ellen in bed early one morning, went to stand on the balcony of their shared room in the Albergo Miramare in Positano. The two women were still travelling de luxe: their balcony overlooked the beach. And that’s what Pat was doing at six o’clock that morning—looking over the beach and having a quiet smoke—when she “noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach from right to left…. There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind? I never saw him again.”37

  The solitary young man making a “right to left” cross on the stage of Pat’s imagination was one of the “germs” from which Tom Ripley would grow. Whatever the nature of her exchanges with Ellen Hill, however high the volume of Pat’s complaints, Patricia Highsmith turned this long, painful relationship with Ellen Blumenthal Hill to extraordinary artistic profit, yeast for the rising loaf of her work. From their union came some of the most crucial elements (or “germs”) for The Blunderer, Deep Water, The Sleepless Night (aka The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Found in the Street, and for Pat’s unfinished epistolary work, First Person Novel. Pat, who phrased so many of her love relationships in terms of “winning” and “losing,” liked to think of herself as the “victim” in this affair. But she was never just a victim. As in the dream she had in New York a year later, Pat would always have “two identities: the victim and the murderer.”

  In September, Ellen was offered employment with the Tolstoy Foundation in Paris, and Pat and Ellen found an apartment at 84 rue de l’Université. It was in this apartment where Pat struck Ellen in bed “to ward her off. Christ, I do believe that she is insane.” As in a Highsmith fiction (or in a Freudian interpretation), every gesture between the two women was now subject to reversion, to interpretation as not only itself but its opposite. In late November, Ellen went on a business trip to Geneva, and Pat, refusing to accompany her, bought a plane ticket to Florence, where she checked into a cheap student pensione, the Bartolini. After the upscale comforts of living with Ellen, the contrast seemed awful, but discomfort would always sharpen Pat’s perceptions. “Dismal corridors,” Pat wrote of the Bartolini, “where you can break your neck after sundown.”38

  It was at this pensione where Pat made the acquaintance of the decade-younger English novelist and journalist Brian Glanville, whose work she would later promote to agents in America and France. They read each other’s writing, and Glanville later said that the early extracts he saw of The Blunderer were “clumsy and naïve” but that Pat was “charming.”39 Pat thought Glanville’s novel The Reluctant Dictator was “well constructed, but the facile English style does not build the climaxes sufficiently.” 40 It was a classic meeting of young writers.

  At her friend Don Porter’s cocktail party, Pat met the Columbia University professor Mark Schorer, who was writing about D. H. Lawrence; she liked Schorer well enough to make sure she saw him again. But all the while, Pat was thinking about The Blunderer: “It resembles Strangers perhaps too much in structure but not in story.” 41 “As with Strangers, I know what will happen but not in detail how it will happen. I get my characters and let them go along.” 42

  Pat was also thinking about Ellen, and after a few days, racked with the peculiar combination of needs and attractions which bound her so tightly to this relationship, she phoned Ellen in the middle of the night, took a train from Florence to Geneva, disembarked into Ellen’s arms, and set out with her on another of their erratic progresses: from Geneva to Paris, thence to Basel, St. Moritz, Venice, and “gloomy, functional, masculine” Trieste, where they took an apartment at 22 Via Stupavich at the beginning of 1953. Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic coast whose annexation to Italy was not settled until 1954, was polyglot and divided, having been “liberated” by two different countries and balkanized by several languages and dialects. It was still governed by British and American military forces when Pat and Ellen went there to live: a no-man’s-land providing the perfect backdrop for their perpetually decomposing affair. In her diary entry of 5 December, Pat wrote forlornly: “I am a cork on her stormy sea, drifting where she goes.” 43

  On their stop in Paris in
December, Pat had written “a synopsis of the gay book—about character[s] like Pat & Jo”—another commercial idea, using yet another ex-lover—and then she dropped it. She went to Calmann-Lévy and had a private meeting with Manès Sperber, the noted Jewish refugee writer and senior editor at Calmann-Lévy, “who ripped my book (The Price of Salt) apart.” 44 Sperber said: “[Y]our men are ridiculous…they operate by tics instead of character.” 45 Pat proudly told him she hadn’t intially gotten an advance for the book, that “if any book was written by me because I wanted to, this was it.” And in her cahier, stung by Sperber’s criticism, she left a sour description of him, a description that was obviously shadowed by her feelings for Ellen: “The mind of a middle European Jew, systematized, formularized, dogmatic, arrogant, superior and closed.” 46

  In Venice, Pat once again telephoned Peggy Guggenheim to meet for cocktails at the inevitable Harry’s Bar. “With 3 dogs and a fairy is how she appeared,” said Pat. Peggy was “amicable” but nervous, and Pat noticed that her dogs were receiving injections for distemper and that Ellen was “very popular due to her international work.” At Harry’s Bar, Pat started talking to the English writer Mary Oliver and her friend Jody, “Jane Bowles’ friends’ types. Both queer, in pants.” She heard that Jane Bowles was back in New York. “I wish I were,” Pat wrote feelingly.